The Tungsten encoding used by Databricks is optimized for storing string data; newly-added native support for querying JSON strings means that string types are always most efficient.

Because Delta Lake uses Parquet for data storage, data types can be easily evolved by just modifying file footer information in place.

Human labor in writing code is the largest cost associated with data engineering workloads; as such, automating table declaration logic should be a priority in all migration workloads.

Because Databricks will infer schema using types that allow all observed data to be processed, setting types manually provides greater assurance of data quality enforcement.

Schema inference and evolution on Databricks ensure that inferred types will always accurately match the data types used by downstream systems.